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Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Cosatu welcomes decline in unemployment rate

Oscar Thomas

11 February 2015

The Congress of South African
Trade Union has welcomed the slight drop in the unemployment rate.

Statistics South Africa
released its report for the fourth quarter which revealed that the unemployment
rate had declined from 25.4 % to 24.3 % in the third quarter of 2014.

However the union says these
figures may not reflect a long-term trend and Cosatu’s National Spokesperson
Patrick Craven explains why this is so.

Craven said one is that in the
fourth quarter of every year there are a lot temporary or casual jobs created
in the run up to holiday season and the run up on farms in the summer period.

Craven said these jobs may not
still even be there and secondly our rate of economic growth is still too slow
to maintain that kind of production in unemployment.

Craven said Thirdly of course these
figures cover the period before we started load shedding and while nobody knows
for certain what that effect will have on our economy it seems highly unlikely
that jobs will be lost as a result of it.

Meanwhile the union said while
any drop in unemployment is good it is too early to celebrate as economic
growth in the country is slow, therefore it is unable to create jobs that are
needed for the current economy.

Statistics South Africa
also revealed that 4.9 million people are officially unemployed in South Africa.

“We shouldn’t drop our guard
and push ahead even more strongly with expansionist economic policies which
will create jobs as that is what we want and are hoping to hear from the
President as it is still a huge national crisis” Craven added.